Interwebs Treasures #4

Some reviews of D&D Next (also known as 5th Edition).

I am having a hard time recognizing this as “real” D&D. I am old.

Other stuff I found this time:

I have a few observations on sexism and gaming. A few thoughts. I don’t pretend to be a scholar in this area, so cut me some slack if I’m way off base, but do comment if you wish.

  1. I have only DMed one campaign in which we had female players. This was when I was in my mid 20s, and I ran a game for my wife, a female friend of ours, and straight male friend, and a gay male friend. I’m assuming this may not be a common mix of players, but times have changed and I could be wrong. All of these people were highly educated – working on or having Masters degrees or PhD in some heavy subjects. It’s been said that women are not attracted to gaming because of the complexity of the rules. I don’t know about this, because I’m not a woman. I can say that these two women had never played an RPG before, and they LOVED it. The truth is that once a player has created a character, and has some understanding of what the character can do, the player doesn’t need to know a lot of rules. The Game Master needs to know the rules. The players just need to tell the DM what they want to do.  So if women really are generally averse to games with tons of rules, it really shouldn’t matter for RPGs. Over time everyone picks up the rules.
  2. People get very attached to their characters. Young people in particular, but I think everyone can get very psychologically caught up in the game. Thus, it is entirely possible for an act of violence or intimidation happening to a character in the game to be very much real to the real-world player on the receiving end. When my 15th level thief got killed in the Tomb of Horrors when I was 15, I was BUMMED! And I wasn’t even being harassed by a horny DM.
  3. I’ve read some stuff lately about women at conventions being harassed, in particular when they are involved in Cosplay. Dear men: because a woman decides to dress as a sexy Thor, and regardless of how well she succeeds, she is not giving you permission to act like an ass. There is no contradiction in a human being wanting to have fun and be sexy whilst simultaneously not wishing to be verbally or physically harassed, groped, etc.
  4. To sum up: if you are gaming with someone, it is incumbent on YOU to help that person feel welcome, respected, and appreciated at the table. Err on the side of caution.

 

the Overman

Back in college my roommates and I played a lot of Champions. I had a martial artist character who was a human/alien hybrid, Randal V (Roman numeral 5). Due to his strange appearance and experience with prejudice, he hated racism to the point that it was a disadvantage.  Our GM therefore designed his arch-enemy to capitalize on this. Thus, the neo-nazi supervillian, the Overman, was born. Our GM recently sent me a file with all the old character sheets he had with my artwork on them.

As you can see, when the Overman was last seen I had kicked the crap out of his racist ass, reducing him to -58 Stun.

I can’t remember if I made the swastika on his chest backwards intentionally or not. I probably just messed up.

Just remembering fun stuff.

overman

 

Interwebs Treasures #3

Regarding the first story about the ouster of Gary Gygax from TSR: I’m sure Gary was no cakewalk to work with, but man, reading this stuff sorta makes me want to not play anything past 1st edition.

2nd Edition D&D Revisited

This last weekend I finally had a chance to look through the 2nd Edition books again. It has been, well, about 20 years. That seems impossible, but it’s true. Damn, I am getting old.

A few things I really like about the 2nd Edition rules.

  1. I like the weapon specialization rules for fighters. I suppose they are similar to the old Unearthed Arcana rules, which I never had but have heard a lot about.
  2. The 2nd Edition DMG has some rules/guidelines for awarding XP to character for doing the things their character class would, in fact, do.
  3. On a similar note, I like the separate Group XP awards and Individual XP awards. That makes sense.
  4. Specialization for magic users is also cool. I like that.
  5. The higher level limitations for demi-human races is nice. Some of the originals were way too low.
  6. I think the advice in the DMG about creating encounters is really good.
  7. I like addition of the Bard as a subclass of Rogue, that can be played from 1st level.
  8. The use of THAC0 (To Hit Armor Class Zero) system for determining the “to hit” number is nice, actually.

Overall, the 2nd Edition is streamlined where it needs to be, but adds stuff where it needs to. I do remember liking it a lot when I was using it.

A few things I don’t like about it:

  1. They removed the Half-Orc PC race. That sucks. I would add it back.
  2. This is kind of silly, but the 1st Edition books were written at a higher level of literacy. A college level. They seemed scholarly. They made you feel smart. The 2nd Edition books are not written for morons, but they are certainly written for a lower reading level. I miss the sage-like writing.
  3. I liked the Monk character class from 1st Edition. I would add it back in.
  4. I would keep the Demons and Devils and other evil stuff from the 1st Edition Monster Manual. Because, you know, that stuff is fantasy.

I’m sure I will come up with some other observations over the next few months. I think I would probably go ahead and use 2nd Edition rules these days. They retain enough of what was good about 1st edition improve a few things.

I still haven’t really taken a hard look at the 5th Edition basic rules, and I don’t have the new Starter Set. I will most likely pick that up this week and spend some quality time with it.  A quick look revealed a few things. They have changed the magic-user to a 6-sided hit die, so they aren’t quite as physically weak. They’ve also added the ability to use Cantrip spells at will, and they don’t take up a spell slot. I think I like that. I am anxious to see the new Players Handbook and DMG and see what they did with it.

Trying to decide whether to send my nephew the old 2nd Edition stuff or the new 5th. It seems like maybe 5th would be better. Might as well start him with the version most of his friends will be playing.

An adventure partially designed…

I’ve been working on the skeletal structure of an adventure and a campaign setting. I think the setting itself needs a lot of work still, but it is at least a start. The structure of the adventure is coming along a little better. I think that my best DMing days were without a doubt the game I ran in the early 1990s for my wife and some friends. I wouldn’t say I’m a fantastic DM/GM, but I think I got a lot better during that campaign. I spent a lot more time working on various levels of plot, from the big picture to the character level.

I am also seeing why I haven’t gamed in a while, or at least DMed/GMed. I am not satisfied to just slap an adventure together. I really like the process of creating a solid game with some good rationale and motivations. Over the last few years I’ve been writing a lot in general – nothing I have published on blogs – and have come to appreciate the value of being a very harsh self-editor. After writing anything but a blog post , I give it a day or two and really go back and edit with great fervor. Even in the writing up the outline of this first adventure, I can see the effects of these years of writing on adventure creation. If I do DM a game, it may not be the greatest thing ever, but it will be a lot better than anything I’ve done before.

In particular, I think the enhanced editing skills and planning will help the non-dungeon parts of an adventure. In my experience, that is where a lot of DMs kind of lose it. It’s easier to keep a party on-track when they are confined to a dungeon or similar environment. They can still do unexpected things, but it’s unlikely they’ll do something terribly off the path you envisioned.  I’ll write more about this soon, but in my last game I started making what I called “contingency trees”, to try to envision what the characters might do at critical points in the adventures (for instance, finding a clue or something), and thus give myself a clearer route to getting them back on path without them ever realizing they were off it.

This helped me a lot, as I’m not super good at coming up with stuff on the fly.

That’s all for today.

 

Something Challenging…

…making interesting adventures for 1st level characters, played by very experienced gamers.

I would like to see some comments about this. It is kind of a bummer, I think, for experienced players to have to go through the usual kobold-infested adventure to start a campaign. I have my own ideas on this subject – ideas and opinions – but I’d rather see what other GMs and gamers think about this.

So please…get your comments on.

Interwebs Treasures #2

Nerd Poker: a podcast by comedian Brian Posehn and other funny people who play D&D do exactly that – play D&D – and you listen to it. And it is fun, and funny. I listened to the most recent couple of episodes, and today I’m starting on episode .
bpdandd

 

Google Sketch-Up of the classic AD&D module setting, the Tomb of Horrors. This is where my highest level character got killed – turned into pink dust. To compare, here is a very nice reproduction the original map from the Dungeon Module, from Mad Irishman Productions.

sup_tomb

 

Back in the 1980s, radio preachers/huckster/entertainer Bob Larson took on all manner of spiritual malady. Heavy Metal, Goth Culture, Yoga, and yes…D&D. Every day was a fantastic journey into strangeness. He compiled all his notions into to a book he sold on-the-air. Sorry – he didn’t sell it. It was a gift for people who contributed to his forever-almost-out-of-money-and-off-the-air ministry. The book was called “Bob Larson’s Book of Spiritual Warfare. Here is a link to the section on D&D. Awesomeness.

What 1st Edition D&D Got Right

I’m kind of thinking “out loud” in this post, so please just bear with me…

Like a lot of gamers my age (perhaps most of them), AD&D was my introduction to RPGs. My friends had been playing for about a year before I got interested. It has always been hard to break through the mental barrier my skateboarding addiction has created, so I was a slow adapter to the RPG cult.

There were, of course, things we didn’t like about the system. Mostly the combat system. As teenage boys, I think we wanted greater detail in the combat. There were a lot of competing systems that we tried. The Fantasy Trip (soon to become GURPS), the Hero System, the RuneQuest system, etc, etc. All were really better combat systems. Much better.

But when I think back on it, it seems like what we gained in combat realism, we lost in over the top heroics.

And that’s where D&D got it right. All that stuff about gaining experience levels, hit points, becoming harder and harder to kill. All that contributed to that great “Conan swam across the Eastern Sea with an ox under one arm, came out, cooked and ate the ox, and then single-handedly defeated an army of ghouls” feeling.

The system didn’t work (nor was it intended to work) well for unarmed combat, armies, or combat purists who wanted specific fighting moves. To me it was kind of a middle of the road system. It offered some detail, but not enough to get bogged down.

Some players just don’t want to get so wrapped up in game mechanics, and are willing to give the GM a little more latitude to flesh things out on the fly. They are into the story and the roleplaying, and don’t want to spend 2 hours on one fight.

Now, all these years later, I also think the Experience Point/Levels system was a good thing for D&D. Most other RPGs don’t really have levels. They let you add points to your character and improve your characteristics and skills, which is great and I tended to gravitate toward those systems. But there was some real utility to knowing the difference between a 1st level fighter and 10th level fighter. In retrospect, I don’t see it so much as a “dumbed down” system, but rather one that is conducive to a particular kind of role playing, meeting particular needs.

So why do I think the more realistic systems lost the super heroics of D&D? Simple. In most of those, there is still a chance that a very minor pest (kobold, etc), could score a lucky hit and just KILL a player character dead. That is realistic, but for a lot of gamers it isn’t fun.

I haven’t had a chance to delve back into the 2nd Edition rules, yet, but I seem to remember from the game I ran in the mid 1990s that those rules had improved the combat system a bit. I’ll have to check them out this week, but it seems like they offered a little bit more realism/options during combat without turning the game into simply a game of combat simulation.

I suppose this is all just today that what I thought sucked (AD&D) as I gained experience as a gamer did not, in fact, suck, but was actually pretty damned good for a particular kind of game.

Qwirkle

qwirkleI learned of Qwirkle on Tabletop, a web series about table top games, starring Wil Wheaton and others. First let me just say – really fun series. I’ve watched a few, and dug it.

Qwirkle is a pretty simple game to play, but there’s lots of room for strategy. I thought it would be nice to take on vacation and play with my niece and nephews. It’s a smart game, but doesn’t require a lot of experience-based knowledge, so kids can play pretty effectively with adults. There’s an element of chance, as in Scrabble, as you are dependent on which tiles you draw from the bag. Unlike Scrabble, you don’t need to have a large vocabulary. I thought his game would be especially fun with my oldest nephew, who at 13 is quite smart but has pretty heavy dyslexia. Kid has an awesome vocabulary, but can’t spell to save his life. (Not a big deal, in my opinion. Who really remembers history’s greatest spellers?).

I’m not going to go over all the rules – you can check out the website and the video from Tabletop. This is a pattern creating game, using tiles with colored shapes. The idea is to create lines of either similar shapes or color, getting a point for each tile in a line (including tiles in lines you are just adding to), and an extra six points if you create a line of 6 (called a Qwirkle). Actually, there’s not a lot more rules than that. Just few. So you can “learn” to play in about 45 seconds.

It took about 40 minutes to play – perfect for a short and fun diversion from adults drinking alcohol and listening to bad pop country music.

I suggest you check this game out.

Gaming space, players, etc.

When I was at Madness Games & Comics buying the 1st Edition D&D reprints yesterday, I asked about the gaming tables. Apparently, barring schedule events, they are first come/first serve. Pretty great. Nice big tables. Might be a good place to play, and also maybe join a once a week or month gaming group? Kinda hoping so.

Apparently they have a “come and try the new games” kind of thing on Wednesday nights, which conflicts with my Aikido practice, so that is out. But I’ll have to investigate further.

My friend Dave, who works at Half Price Books, brought me pretty good copies of the 2nd Edition Players Handbook and DMG yesterday. Much appreciated. Should be able to locate the “Monstrous Manual” too. As I remember it (haven’t had a chance to delve back into those books yet), 2nd Edition actually had some nice improvements to the rules. I can always add back in the demons, devils, and other introductions to the Dark Arts.